Frenkie de Jong and Memphis Depay will meet referee Antonio Mateu Lahoz next Saturday. The referee has been appointed to officiate the derby between Barcelona and Espanyol in LaLiga. Mateu Lahoz was also the referee at the World Cup match between the Netherlands and Argentina. His performance in that game earned him a lot of criticism.
In total, the Spaniard handed out no fewer than nineteen cards that match. Afterwards, De Jong, among others, was not lenient in his criticism of the referee. “From the moment regular playing time was over, they went to him,” De Jong said General Journal. “From that moment on he only whistled for Argentina. It was just really outrageous.”
Lionel Messi, who got away well at the beginning of the second half after he did not receive a yellow card for an intentional handball, also strongly criticized Mateu Lahoz. “As a player you can’t be honest or say what you think, because then you get a few games suspension. But FIFA needs to look into this. You can’t put a referee on such an important game if he can’t handle it. We were already afraid of this, because we know how he leads games,” said the superstar after the quarterfinals.
The LaLiga game between Barcelona and Espanyol starts on New Year’s Eve at 2 p.m. For both clubs it is the first league game in almost two months, as a result of the World Cup interruption. Whether De Jong and Depay will actually come into action against Espanyol is of course still the question, although that does not seem unlikely: De Jong is now a permanent fixture in Barcelona’s midfield, while Memphis is seen as the potential replacement for the suspended player. Robert Lewandowski.
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